Attacker ‘considered’ going to Rome: media
‘Radicalized in prison’
ROME, Dec 30, (Agencies): Suspected Berlin truck attacker Anis Amri considered heading to Rome before finally plumping for Milan where police shot him dead, Italian media reported Friday.
The Corriere della Sera daily said that security cameras at Turin station had twice recorded the 24-year-old searching for trains either to Rome or Milan.
“In the end, he chose a regional train for Lombardy because at that late hour, there was no train going to the capital,” said the paper, adding that this showed he had “no precise travel plan.”
Several papers also reported that when he arrived in Milan in the early hours of December 23, Amri asked a passer-by where he could catch a train or bus for “Rome, Naples or the south.”
Sesto San Giovanni, the town north of Milan where Amri was eventually shot, is the starting point for international coaches to Spain, Morocco, Albania or southern Italy.
Local Rome daily Il Messaggero said it was “not a coincidence” that he was eyeing the capital as that city was where he “probably had the most contacts”.
Amri had close links to Italy, arriving there in 2011 from Tunisia after the revolution that led to the Arab Spring.
While in Italy, he served a four-year sentence for setting fire to a refugee shelter — a prison stint during which he was radicalised, security sources believe.
He arrived in Germany in July 2015, amid the chaos of a mass migrant influx, where he went on to frequently change residence and identities.
Then, on December 19, he is thought to have driven a hijacked truck into a crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 11 people and also shooting dead the registered driver, a Polish man.
Italian Premier Paolo Gentiloni said Thursday that there are no indications the Tunisian fugitive from the Berlin Christmas market attack, who was shot dead near Milan, had any significant contacts in Italy.
Italian investigators have been trying to determine whether Anis Amri tapped a jihadi network in Italy, his European port of entry when he left Tunisia in early 2011 and the end of his nearly four-day flight following the Berlin truck attack that left 12 dead.
“No particular networks have emerged in Italy,” Gentiloni told reporters in Rome ahead of a security meeting in Milan headed by his interior minister.
But the prime minister said there still is a need to enhance anti-terror measures, including making it easier to deport migrants living in the country illegally. Existing measures already permit Italy to expel foreign nationals with suspected terror ties, with 66 carried out so far this year and 152 since the beginning of 2015.
Amri
Expelled
They include a Tunisian man living in the northern province of Brescia who was expelled Thursday. The Interior Ministry alleged he received instructions last month to carry out an attack in Italy “in retaliation for operations by Italy in Libya.”
Interior Minister Marco Minniti said the deported man apparently had no connection with fellow Tunisian Amri and there were no indications any attack was imminent.
“But the expulsion was important because he wasn’t just any character. He had a profile that was potentially interesting,” Minniti said.
Madrid town hall is banning private vehicles of 3.5 tons or more from entering the city in the run-up to major festive parades next week, so as to avert truck attacks like those in Berlin recently and Nice last year.
The town hall said the measure is preventive and not due to police fears of an imminent attack.
The measure will apply between Jan. 3 and Jan. 5, the eve of the Christian feast of the Epiphany when tens of thousands of people attend parades to celebrate the arrival of the magi.
Spain has been on one step below maximum national security alert since attacks in Europe and elsewhere in 2015. Police have arrested 175 suspected jihadi activists in the period, including two this week in Madrid.
The Pakistani man wrongly arrested for the Berlin truck attack on Friday said he had told German police he could not even drive and was now afraid for the safety of his family back home.
Naveed Baloch, an asylum seeker from the troubled province of Balochistan, told the Guardian newspaper he had just left a friend’s house and was crossing a street when he saw a police car approaching fast and picked up his pace.
He said he was arrested and taken to a police station, where he was undressed and photographed.
Communicate
Baloch, who sought refuge in Germany as a member of a secular separatist movement in Balochistan, said he struggled to communicate because no translator could be found who could speak his native Balochi.
“I calmly told them I cannot drive at all. Neither can I even start a vehicle,” he said.
Baloch was arrested on December 19 in the hours after the attack on a Christmas market in the heart of Berlin in which 12 people were killed.
Police released Baloch 24 hours later, after failing to find evidence of his involvement.
The bells of a brown stone church rang across a Polish village as hundreds of mourners gathered Friday to bid farewell to a truck driver killed in the Berlin Christmas market attack.
Lukasz Urban, 37, has been described as the first victim of the attack on Dec 19 that killed a total of 12 people. He was waiting to deliver a shipment of steel in Berlin when his truck was hijacked by the Tunisian perpetrator of the attack. He was shot and his body was found in the cab of the truck.
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda joined Urban’s family, friends and neighbors, gathering with them in a church in the village church in Banie, near the border with Germany.
One police officer and two suspected militants have been killed in a shootout in Russia’s volatile North Caucasus.
Fatina Ubaydatova, spokeswoman in Russia’s republic of Dagestan, said on Friday a police squad was trying to stop a car with suspected militants outside the city of Khasavyurt late on Thursday when people in that car opened fire on them. Police identified the two men as local militants who attacked policemen earlier this week in the regional capital, Makhachkala.